Modern commercial/private aircraft, as well as older aircraft, include a myriad of instrumentation panels associated with electronic devices having controls, displays, and software applications, which are used to present information to pilots and/or copilots during flight. The electronic devices, controls, displays and applications are interfaced together to form avionic equipment within the aircraft.
Conventionally, pilots/copilots access one or more interface devices of the avionic equipment prior to flight, in order to customize various information in preparation for their flights. Some of this information can be merely preferences desired by the pilots/copilots, such as desired field locations for presenting flight settings/options within a display. Other information is more functional, such as flight plans for scheduled flights. Moreover, some information is used to alter displayed units of measure (e.g., metric standard versus U.S. standard, and others), which are associated with displayed flight settings/options (including instrument readings).
Typically, when avionic equipment is powered down, the then-existing settings/options for the equipment are retained and re-provided when the equipment is subsequently powered up again. Thus, when one pilot/copilot takes over for a different pilot/copilot many of the initial provided settings/options require manual adjustment. This can be time consuming, tedious, and undesirable for pilots/copilots. Moreover, manual adjustment can be repetitively required each time the equipment is powered up.
Also, many larger airlines can require that some settings/options be used by their pilots/copilots for purposes of standardization, training, and/or safety concerns. Thus, administratively defined settings/options can be circumvented or avoided altogether, when pilots/copilots manually re-enter flight settings/options. This is so, because modifying flight settings/options for conventional avionic equipment is rigid and time consuming. Therefore, many administratively defined settings/options avoid widespread enforcement by the airlines or are manually changed by the pilots/copilots.
As is apparent to one skilled in the art, existing avionic equipment does not provide practical reusable settings/options. Moreover, since the settings/options are not easily modifiable, standard required flight settings/options can be more easily circumvented or avoided by pilots/copilots. Therefore, there exists a need to better create, modify, maintain, store, and retrieve flight settings/options for avionic equipment.